by the way, in response to your earlier post, I had turned off ZoneAlarm and it had made no difference.

When running winsockfix, while it was doing the registry backup, it displayed a number of errors "saving the file". I kept clicking "continue". It made the backup ( I guess) and went on to do the "fix". after a required reboot, things seem better. I was able to load several web sites. I loaded www.amazon.com (but without the graphics) without getting the "no server" error message. still no microsoft.com or weather.com.

I ran three different speed tests (while connected through DSL) and they were all clustering around 3.1 mbps for download and 420 kbps for upload.

do you think we should delete some of those programs that run at start-up to see if that would help?